JeremyBlum.com

Yeah, it’s been a while since my last product review…I ordered this fancy new Home Server to backup all the computers in my house, and figured it would be the perfect opportunity to do another product review. Naturally, my brother (youtube user zoop425), wanted to review it too, so we reviewed it together. This made for some pretty funny bloopers (in my humble opinion), so even if you aren’t in the market for a home server, skip to the end to watch what happens when we attempt to work together :)

It’s always a good idea to keep your old hard drives.  Case and point, if Zach (the one filming this video) hadn’t been looking through his old drive, he never would have found this gem that we filmed a few years ago.  It’s basically just 3 minutes of computer carnage, and some bad acting on my part, but I figured some people would enjoy it.  Check it out!

Time flies…it seems like just yesterday that I was filming Ultimate Computer 1, the very first video I uploaded to youtube. 46 videos and 1,614 subscribers later, the newest Ultimate Computer has arrived!  This time, the build focuses on bang-for-your-buck power, effectively providing tons of gaming horsepower, for a manageable price tag of around $2000US.  Check out the video below, or go visit the project page at UltimateComputers.net to download the song and more!

The nerf sentry gun was developed as a final project for Cornell University’s CS1114 Matlab Robotics class.  Jason Wright (www.jasonline.net) and I worked on the gun together, and were awarded “coolest final project”.

Check out the video of the gun in action, and see how we built it:

READ ON FOR PICTURES, SOURCE CODE, AND A COMPLETE FEATURE LIST

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Users on this blog, ultimatecomputers.net, and youtube have been begging me to do an overclocking guide for a long time.  Initially I was reluctant, because overclocking works differently on almost every system.  But, I’ve finally given in, and I put together a two-part TechBits episode on overclocking.  Because it would be impossible to cover all possible configurations, this video is not intended to be a tutorial, but rather a guide get people started with overclocking.  If you need more help overclocking your specific system, there’s a whole forum for that at UltimateComputers.net!  The community (and I) can help you out there ;)

As some of you may know, we launched an UltimateComputers.net Folding Team a few months ago.  I’m proud to announce that we already have 15 members, and have a grand score of over 442,000!

If you don’t know what folding is, it is essentially a way for you to utilize the spare processing power on your home computer to fold proteins.  The results of these computations may hold the key to curing diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more.  If you would like to download the folding client, go visit Stanford’s Folding Website.  Don’t forget to enter the UltimateComputers.net Team Number: 150164.

The main reason I bring this up, however, is because I want to share this great photoshopped picture of me by one of the UC.net forum members, muffe.

An area of huge confusion when it comes to building a computer is picking out the right power supply.  Does it have the right connectors?  How many Voltage Rails are there?  Will it protect my components?  Does it offer enough wattage?

In these week’s two-part episode of techbits, I answer all of your most common questions about power supplies.  Both parts are embedded below in a convenient playlist:

Unlike many of my other builds, I wouldn’t consider this one to be an “ultimate computer“.  The Cornell University Solar Decathlon Engineering Controls Team had something different in mind for this computer.  As I’ve mentioned in some previous posts, Solar Decathlon is a team at Cornell that is building a fully solar-powered house.  In October, we will bring that house down to Washington to compete against 19 other international teams in a competition that judges the houses on design, feasibility, power consumption, and more.  My particular role, along with the rest of the Engineering controls team, will be to get everything in the house connected and working.  I can’t go into too much detail, because it’s top secret (kinda), but a small group of us are focusing on the home entertainment and automation systems.  This home theater PC is just a small part of the final system.

There are few design goals that we had in mind for this system which haven’t applied to previous computers that I’ve built:  It needs to be totally silent, very energy efficient, and 100% reliable.

For those reasons, we decided to go with a solid state hard drive (media content will be stored elsewhere on the network), A motherboard with high energy efficiency and a built-in Nvidia 9300 GPU, and an 80+ certified 430W PSU.

The video is embedded below.  Check it out, and also stop by the Cornell Solar Decathlon Website…maybe give us a donation if you would like to support our cause. ;)

PS: If you like the music, stop by the project page at UltimateComputers.net to download it for free!  You can also find the parts list there.

This week’s episode of techbits was a request from youtube user glideby7.  He wanted some help figuring out which video card to get, and I figured a brief explination of the specifications and compatibilities would be of some help.  Check out the embed below, and don’t forget to give me suggestions for future episodes.

(HD on youtube)

I noticed a whole bunch of questions about various types of computer cooling this past week on the forum, so I figured we were due for a TechBits episode on the topic!  You can check it out below or you can watch it in HD on youtube.

In other news, I broke 500 subscribers this past week on youtube!  I’m super excited about that, and I’m hoping I can keep that number growing so long as I continue to release videos on a fairly regular basis.

Anyways, that’s pretty much it for right now, enjoy the video!